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It is a well‐known fact that the construction industry always passes through two distinctive problems during the construction stage: slippages of project‐schedules, i.e. time‐frame, and overruns of project‐costs, i.e. budget. However, limited literature is available to solve or dilute these two problems before they even occur. It is strongly believed that the bulk of the two mentioned problems can be mitigated to a great extent, if not eliminated, provided that proper attention is paid to the pre‐construction phases of projects. Normally projects are implemented through traditionally old techniques which generally emphasize only solving “construction problems during the construction phase”. The aim of this article is therefore to unveil a professional methodology known as Project Control System (PCS) focusing on pre‐construction phases of construction projects.

In this article, the authors share the lessons learned during implementation of Kuwait University projects worth approximately $400 million in a span of ten years. The task of the project management/construction management (PM/CM) is being provided to the university by a joint venture team of international and local specialists.

The pre‐construction methodology ensures smooth and successful implementation during construction phases of the projects as they are generally executed in a fast‐pace, deadline‐driven and cost‐conscious environment. The intuitive proactive methods, if implemented during pre‐construction stage, automatically answer the questions that are encountered during the execution periods of projects.

In this article, the authors share the lessons learned during PM/CM during projects over a span of ten years, which could be of use to others.

It is estimated that more than half of the construction industry’s projects encounter significant cost overruns and major delays, resulting in the industry having a tarnished reputation. Therefore, it is crucial to identify key project cost and schedule performance factors. However, despite the attempts of numerous researchers, their results have been inconsistent. Most of the literature has focused solely on the construction phase budget and time overruns; the engineering/design and procurement phase costs and schedule performances have been rarely studied. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The objective of this study was primarily to identify and prioritize engineering, procurement and construction key performance factors (KPFs) and to strategize ways to prevent performance delays and cost overruns. To achieve these objectives, more than 200 peer-reviewed journal papers, conference proceedings and other scholarly publications were studied and categorized based on industry type, physical location, data collection and analysis methods.

It was concluded that both the time required to complete engineering/construction phases and the cost of completing them can be significantly affected by design changes. The two main causes of delays and cost overruns in the procurement phase are construction material shortages and price fluctuations. Other factors affecting all phases of the project are poor economic condition, equipment and labor shortages, delays in owners’ timely decision making, poor communication between stakeholders, poor site management and supervision, clients’ financial issues and severe weather conditions. A list of phase-based strategies which address the issue of time/cost overruns is presented herein.

The findings of this study address the potential confusion of the industry’s practitioners related to the inconsistent list of potential KPFs and their preventive measurements, and pave the way for the construction research community to conduct future performance-related studies.

The aggressive competition in the real estate market forces real estate developers to tackle the challenge of selecting the best project construction phasing alternative. The real estate industry is characterized by high costs, high profit and high risks. The schedules of real estate projects are also characterized by having large number of repetitive activities that are executed over a long duration. The repetitiveness, long duration of execution, the high amounts of money involved and the high risk made it desirable to leverage the impact of changes in phasing plans on net present value of amounts incurred and received over the long execution and selling duration. This also changes the project progress, and delivery time as well as their respective impact on customer degree of satisfaction. This research addresses the problem of selecting the best phasing alternative for real estate development projects while maximizing customer satisfaction and project profit.

The research proposes a model that generates all construction phasing alternatives and performs decision-making to rank all possible phasing alternatives. The proposed model consists of five modules: (1) Phasing Sequencing module, (2) Customer Satisfaction module, (3) Cash-In calculation module, (4) Cost Estimation module and (5) Decision-making module. A case study was presented to demonstrate the practicality of the model.

The proposed model satisfies the real estate market's need for proper construction phasing plans evaluation and selection against the project's main success criteria, customer satisfaction and project profit. The proposed model generates all construction phasing alternatives and performs multi-criteria decision making to rank all possible phasing alternatives. It quantifies the score of the two previously mentioned criteria and ranks all solutions according to their overall score.

The research proposes a model that assist real estate market's need for proper construction phasing plans evaluation and selection against the project's main success criteria, customer satisfaction and project profit. The proposed model can be used to conclude general guidelines and common successful practices to be used by real estate developers when deciding the construction phasing plan. In this study the model is based on business models where all the project units are sold, rental cases are not considered. Also, the budget limitations that might exist when phasing is not considered in the model computations.

The model can be used as a complete platform that can hold all real estate project data, process revenues and cost information for estimating profit, plotting cash flow profiles, quantifying the degree of customer satisfaction attributable to each phasing alternative and providing recommendation showing the best one. The model can be used to conclude general guidelines and common successful practices to be used by real estate developers when tackling the challenge of selecting construction phasing plans.

Extended reality (XR) is an emerging technology, with its popularity rising in different industry sectors, where its application has been recently considered in construction safety. This study aims to investigate the applications of XR technologies in the safety of construction through projects lifecycle perspective.

Scientometric analysis was conducted to discover trends, keywords, contribution of countries and publication outlets in the literature. The content analysis was applied to categorize previous studies into three groups concerning the phase of lifecycle in which they used XR.

Results of the content analysis showed that the application of XR in the construction safety is mostly covered in two areas, namely, safety training and risk management. It was found that virtual reality was the most used XR tool with most of its application dedicated to safety training in the design phase. The amount of research on the application of augmented reality and mixed reality in safety training, and risk management in all phases of lifecycle is still insignificant. Finally, this study proposed three main areas for using the XR technologies regarding the safety issues in future research, namely, control of safety regulations and safety coordination in construction phase, and safety reports in the operation phase.

This paper inspected the utilization of all types of XR for safety in each phase of construction lifecycle and proposed future directions for research by addressing the safety challenges in each phase.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of Value Management towards achieving sustainability through reducing the construction waste during the design process.

To achieve the abovementioned aim, a research methodology consisting literature review and survey questionnaire is designed to achieve the following objectives: first, building a comprehensive understanding of the research topic through reviewing literature related to the nature of the construction industry, waste in construction, sustainability, the design phase and Value Management; second, presenting and analysing two case studies to validate the role of Value Management towards reducing waste in construction projects; third, conducting a survey questionnaire with a representative sample of architectural design firms (ADFs) in Egypt to evaluate their perception and application of Value Management towards reducing the construction waste during the design phase; and finally, proposing a business improvement framework to facilitate the integration of Value Management into the design phase as an approach for reducing construction waste.

The construction waste has a negative impact on achieving sustainability objectives. The design process plays a major role in generating waste throughout the project life cycle. This is a result of improper decisions taken during the design phase. Egypt as a developing country does not have the required technical or financial resources to deal with the huge amount of waste generated during the construction process. The Egyptian Sustainable Development Strategy 2030 focussed on eradicating the waste from its source (i.e. design phase). Integrating Value Management into the design phase will help developing creative ideas and better decisions, which will enable achieving sustainability objectives and reducing construction waste.

The Egyptian Sustainable Development Strategy 2030 has discussed the importance of dealing with the wastes from the source. Although the construction waste is a dangerous type of waste, most research studies have not focussed on the design process as a source for the construction waste. In this research, the design phase was discussed as an important element in reducing the construction waste by using Value Management approach.

This study aims to lay the groundwork for the potential application of value management (VM) in construction projects. This paper presents a critical review on the status of VM in a developing country and highlights the role of perceptions on critical success factors (CSFs) for the phases of VM studies, as the participants in a VM study should consider CSFs tailored to the local context.

A series of interviews and a questionnaire were conducted to understand the drivers, perceptions, barriers, and CSFs of VM in the Jordanian construction industry. Although descriptive statistics were used to analyze the status of VM, a structural equation modeling (SEM) approach was adopted to highlight the interrelationships between perceptions and the CSFs of the three phases of VM (i.e. pre-workshop, workshop, and implementation).

The descriptive analysis revealed conflicting viewpoints for perceptions and drivers. Most practitioners acknowledged little awareness of VM phases, and the SEM results indicated that perceptions of VM, in terms of its capacity in improving the scope and objectives of the project, and reducing overall costs, most strongly influenced the CSFs of the implementation phase in terms of support and clear plan for implementation, and had the least influence on the pre-workshop phase. Further, the perceptions had a moderate effect on the CSFs of the workshop phase and it tended to be positive, highlighting the importance of function analysis in this phase.

This is the first study to reveal the status of VM in Jordan in terms of adoption, drivers, perceptions, barriers and CSFs; no prior studies have investigated how perceptions can affect the CSFs of each phase of VM and the endorsement of VM by the construction industry. The contributions of this study include linking the perceptions of construction professionals with the CSFs of VM.

This study describes how maintenance capability should be created during the design and construction phases of construction projects. Purpose of the abstract to define the elements for creating the maintenance capability and the process to be used in construction life cycle projects for buildings.

An inductive and qualitative research method was used to construct the proposed process based on the literature and 18 interviews in two large construction companies.

The results indicate that the maintenance phase is usually overlooked during the design and construction phases, and capabilities are not systematically built. In particular, processes are lacking in data management, causing severe problems in maintenance.

This study presents a process including key requirements and activities for creating maintenance capability in conjunction with the design and construction phases, which is novel to the literature. The validated process can be adapted based on the needs of the construction company.

This paper aims to propose an innovative building information modelling (BIM)-based framework for multi-objective and dynamic temporary construction site layout design (SLD), which uses a hybrid approach of systematic layout planning (SLP) and mathematical modelling.

The hybrid approach, which follows a step-by-step process for site layout planning, is designed to facilitate both qualitative and quantitative data collection and processing. BIM platform is usedto facilitate the determination of the required quantitative data, while the qualitative data are generated through knowledge-based rules.

The multi-objective layout model represents two important aspects: layout cost and adjacency score. The result shows that the model meets construction managers’ requirements in not only saving cost but also assuring the preferences of temporary facility relationships. This implies that the integration of SLP and mathematical layout modelling is an appropriate approach to deliver practical multi-objective SLD solutions.

The proposed framework is expected to serve as a solution, for practical application, which takes the advantage of technologies in data collection and processing. Besides, this paper demonstrates, by using numerical experimentation and applying Microsoft Excel Solver for site layout optimisation, how to reduce the complexity in mathematical programming for construction managers.

The original contribution of this paper is the attempt of developing a framework in which all data used for the site layout modelling are collected and processed using a systematic approach, instead of being predetermined, as in many previous studies.

To deal with the present situation and recover after the COVID-19 pandemic, construction firms are required to recognise the trends in construction supply chain management (CSCM) for the upcoming years and determine the appropriate practices towards the trends for the improvement of construction activities in terms of strategy, tactic and operations. This paper aims to recognise key trends in CSCM and uses these trends as strategic criteria for the evaluation and prioritisation of lean construction (LC) tools at different project phases including design and architectural engineering, planning and control, on-site construction and safety management.

The integrated analytic hierarchy process–Delphi method is used to collect and analyse the data from construction experts to evaluate the importance levels of the CSCM trends and recommend the appropriate tools for LC practices to improve project performances.

Seven key CSCM trends are identified: lean supply chain management (SCM), supply chain (SC) integration, SC standardisation, SC problem-solving, SC information-sharing, SC flexibility and SC sustainability. Based on these trends, a set of prioritised lean tools are suggested for LC practices, in which “virtual design construction” (VDC) and “last planner system” are considered as the central tools. These two LC practices can be integrated with other effective tools to support the strategic, tactical and operational targets in construction supply chain (CSC) projects.

This study gives the managerial implications by developing an application framework of LC practices for CSC projects. The framework promotes “VDC” as a strategic tool for the phase of design and architectural engineering and considers “last planner system” as the central LC practice for the phase of project planning and control. The framework also focuses on the improvement of efficiency in construction operations by taking into account the aspects of on-site collaboration, problem-solving, improvement and safety.

Up to date, there is still a lack of researches in classifying and prioritising the significant LC tools for each project phase to deal with CSC issues in both breadth and depth. Thus, this study is performed to provide construction managers with the awareness of CSCM trends on which they can focus to have strategic criteria for selecting LC practices to improve CSC performances.

While many procurement systems govern the construction sector, Design/Bid/Build is still prominent among the French building actors. The research applies Lean thinking (via a kaizen event) to the bidding phase of a building construction company to improve its bidding outputs.

The method used in this study is “Action-Research”. A two-month preparation phase was needed to prepare for the kaizen event. The results were based on an assessment conducted after 6 months of the kaizen event. Performance was measured following selected indicators related to ‘Time’, “Economical Impact”, “Quality” and “Sustainability”.

The Lean implementation had positive side-effects on the company’s organization and strategy as well.

The findings of this action-research project can be used to help researchers and practitioners assess the potential application of Lean in the bidding phase. It also provides insights into the importance of the cultural and existing practices for a successful Lean implementation.

A few research projects investigated the application of Lean thinking in bidding as it is considered as a wasteful process. However, waste can also be organized. The research proves that bidding can benefit from Lean thinking.